Square Galaxy

Last June, Google and Yahoo announced a partnership where Yahoo would use Google Advertising on its site to increase revenue.  Yahoo would raise some much needed cash from the more effective advertising, while Google publishes its ads on a very large site.  Currently Yahoo uses its own advertising framework which is less effective.

However, today we learn that the deal is going bust because too many government regulators and advertisors had concerns that this agreement would give Google too much of an advertising monopoly.

The problem is that Yahoo as a company is in trouble.  After the failed Yahoo takeover by Microsoft, Yahoo’s stock is off by 60% of its high this year.

Without this deal, could Yahoo be forced to shrink or even die?  Is killing off Yahoo really worth the risk of a Google monopoly?

A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many document files into Google Docs. I saw that Google had a new API for doing such, so I decided to write a quick little app for the Mac to do just that. Just drag and drop documents onto the icon, and away their uploaded.

I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

Dear Google Adsense,

I find myself logging into the AdSense site frequently, just to see how much money I’ve made by publishing your advertisements. It would be very convenient if you would place much of the Overview information into a Google Gadget that I can have on my iGoogle page.

Google should provide an option to allow projects hosted at Google Code to display and profit from Google Ads. Project owners who would opt into the ads would benefit from the revenue they collect. Google would benefit as well by collecting their share of the advertising revenue. Users might benefit because they can perhaps find other advertised services similar to the project they might be currently looking at.

Recently I’ve decide to open source some more code and templates that I’ve written. I could either share that code from my own website, or I could share it on Google Code, being able to make use of some of the other features they have there. The biggest advantage to providing the code from my website is that I’m able to collect on any advertising revenue, which in the past has been around a dollar or two per thousand views. If Google could provide me a way to generate similar revenue by hosting my code on their site, not only would I consider hosting my code their, but I would find more incentive to write open source code projects.

The only major problem with this might be abuse. If I wanted to make a few extra bucks, what is stopping me from “forking” someone elses project just to host their code under a slightly different name on Google code and profit from the visitors I would have stolen from the more legitimate site.

While Google is perhaps one of the most innovative web development companies out there, sometimes I am slightly disappointed because they fail to meet my exceedingly high expectations. Google has developed and released very few applications that I would consider as world changing. The short list includes Search, Gmail, Maps, Spreadsheets, and Calendar. That isn’t to say that Google hasn’t purchased and developed other emerging technologies which might also been revolutionary–Blogger, Picassa, Writely, Keyhole, and YouTube–but those applications got their start outside of Google. That also isn’t to say that Google hasn’t developed other standards and technologies which have greatly furthered the Internet. I’m simply making the point that Google has developed, from the start, only a few applications that most Internetizens would consider life-changing.

There is perhaps one product which is little known that I consider as having changed the Internet forever. This app has never really seen daylight outside the lab. In fact, its been a part of Google Labs for the last three and a half years. The product of which I’m referring is Google Suggest. If web applications were a family tree, Google Suggest would have been the grandfather of the so-called Web 2.0 apps we have today.

Google Suggest makes use of a web browser feature called XmlHttpRequest. This feature allows the browser to connect back to the web server and download additional content after the web page has already loaded. Today we see this feature used all around the web, but when Google Suggest was first released, few people ever knew that it existed. Post-loading content from the server was so revolutionary, that it has seen incredible adoption all over the net. So although most people never really knew about Google Suggest, it has indeed been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 firestorm.

Today Google released a new product platform which may be listed among the great revolution products from Google. Google App Engine (not to be confused with Google Apps for your Domain) is a service which allows web application developers to host their applications on Google’s servers, using Google technology.

Google App Engine solves the single biggest challenge in web application development: hosting. Having a web host that is well configured, well connected, and well tested is usually expensive, but it seems that Google will be providing at least some level of hosing for free. This really gives developers a whole new level of freedom for creating apps, and I think this will foster a whole new level of web application creativity. Who knows, this might be just the beginning of something called, Web 3.0.